Albania’s Anri Sala to represent France at 55th Venice Biennale

TIRANA, Jan. 24 – Albanian-born, Paris-based artist Anri Sala will represent France at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, reports Le Quotidien de l’art. Sala previously won the Young Artist Prize at the 49th Biennale in 2001 with his film “Uomoduomo”.
Predominantly a video artist, philosopher Jacques Ranciere describes Sala’s visuals as “At the heart of all of Anri Sala’s films, including those that touch most on political issues and tend to documentary form, the same question lurks. A formal one for some, and yet it is the most profound, also in a way the most political. What is it that we see?”
Sala, who is represented by Hauser & Wirth and Marian Goodman galleries, works primarily in video. Daniel Birnbaum wrote in Artforum in 2004 that Sala “is an expert in creating mesmerizing forms of repetition that produce strange states of mind, but he never goes so far as to cause pain.”
This won’t be Sala’s first trip to Venice. His film “Uomoduomo” won the Young Artist Prize at the 2001 biennale. It presented an old man in a Milan cathedral dozing off in a pew, his head dropping and rising, dropping and rising. His video installation “Dammi i colori,” which reflects on the transformation of his hometown of Tirana, Albania, is currently on display at the Tate Modern.
Bertrand Lavier, Tatiana Trouv頨Duchamp Prize-winner of 2007) and Adel Abdessemed were also in the running to represent France at the festival but French minister of culture selected Anri Sala to represent France at the next Venice Biennial in 2013.
Born in Tirana (Albania) in 1974, Sala first studied arts at the Albanian Academy of Art before continuing her studies at the ʣole Nationale des Arts D꤯ratifs in Paris in 1996, and finally moved to Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing until 2000.
Sala is due to create an installation at the Pompidou Centre from 2 May to 6 August 2012.